One of our readers sent me a link to this article posted by the BBC (Thanks Fia) entitled “The push for greener PCs.” The article discuss the problem of power consumption. The computer has become such an important part of our lives and not the least our work environment that its power usage is a considerable factor. The power used by computers around the world is most likely enough to keep more than a few power plants online, and that’s not a good thing. Especially not as the power is not always produced in a clean and environmental fashion. Green power is in 2007 still far from a total reality. However the power consumption of the modern computer is far from innocent.
While we certainly endorse the art of overclocking and do our best to contribute ourselves, there is a nasty downside it. The power consumption of modern computers has reached such a scale that it has even become a significant environmental factor. If we look back ten years, computers were running power supplies topping out at somewhere around 350W perhaps. They had no need for any more power, unless you of course were overclocking, then you might need some more juice.
Back then power supplies had an efficiency that was close to hilarious, 50% was completely normal in many cases. This improved over the years though and today we have the 80 Plus organization, but only the newest and most recently produced power supplies are able to reach this kind of efficiency.
Far from all computers running today have these power supplies. Many companies are still using computers with power supplies that are a few years old, which also means that they are using power supplies with less than decent efficiency. With power supplies only able of 60-70% conversion we have a spill of 30-40%. This is quite ridiculous when you think about it.
While power supplies have been improving (quite a lot) over the last few years, so has also processors. Modern CPUs from both AMD and Intel have taken a turn for the better. While AMD has never really been accused of having especially power-hungry processors, Intel certainly has more than a few processors based on the Prescott core, and other NetBurst-based processors, that consume more than entire computers do today. Both AMD and Intel have realized the importance of keeping power consumption at a minimum today. We’re certainly glad things have come to this.
Sadly, we can’t say that graphics card have come as far. While we are certainly impressed by the low power consumption of some cards, like the newest mid-range and low-end cards by ATI, the power consumption of some of the higher end cards is close to laughable. I should clarify though that both the R600 and G80 architectures have about twice as many transistors as an Intel Core-based processor, but I’m not so sure that’s a really good excuse. The performance of modern graphics cards are astounding, but the price we pay is quite high. It would be nice to see some greener graphics cards in the future.
